by Greg Herren
Synopsis
For Tony Martin, being a senior means being a star on the football team, classes to get through, hanging out with his friends—and dating Candy Dixon. And once he graduates, he’s getting out of Kansas and never looking back. But his best friend Glenn’s decision to come out and be openly gay at their small rural high school creates a lot of problems for the two of them. But a beautiful new student arrives at Southern Heights High—Sara. When all the kids who’ve been mean to Glenn start dying in very strange circumstances, and Glenn starts acting strangely, it’s up to Tony and Candy to get to the bottom of what’s going on in their school—before it’s too late for them.
Sara
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Sara
© 2012 By Greg Herren. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-715-8
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
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Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: July 2012
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
Soliloquy Titles by Greg Herren
Sleeping Angel
Sara
This is for Ashley Bartlett,
because she pouted until I said I would
Chapter One
Being a senior sure doesn’t feel any different, I thought as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I sure don’t look any different—besides that damned pimple on my chin.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting. I’d been looking forward to my senior year almost from the very first day I started high school. This was it—when the year ended, I’d be an adult. No more being treated like a kid, no more getting up Monday through Friday at six thirty, no more being at the mercy of teachers and coaches and guidance counselors—it would all end when I crossed the stage, took the diploma, and put the tassel on the other side of the cap.
It couldn’t happen soon enough, thank you very much.
And then I could get the hell out of this podunk town in the middle of nowhere, and never look back.
I finished toweling my hair and hung the wet towel on the rack. I looked in the mirror again. I touched the angry-looking red blotch in the direct center of my chin. It might as well have been blinking and neon—no one could miss the stupid thing. I sighed and wondered what kind of an omen that would turn out to be as I put on my underwear and a pair of jean shorts. Probably not a good one, I thought, sighing again as I brushed my damp hair into place. I was out of hair gel, so I just parted it on the side and combed it flat.
I was already starting to sweat. It wasn’t even eight in the morning yet, and our crappy house was already turning into a sauna. The house didn’t have central air-conditioning—all we had was some window units in the bedrooms. Mom kept saying when she got a little bit ahead she’d buy one for the bathroom, but until then we’d have to make do with fans.
As long as she was working as a maid at the Best Western over in Kahola, I figured she’d probably get ahead about a year after I graduated.
I walked down the hall back to my bedroom, wiping sweat off my forehead. I stood in front of the window unit and raised my arms so my armpits would dry. When I didn’t feel damp anymore, I reached over to the bed for my purple Trojan Football T-shirt. I pulled it over my head, but had to yank it down hard to get it past my chest. The weightlifting I’d been doing all summer had worked—the shirt stretched so tight across my pecs it looked like it might rip. I looked into the full-length mirror hung on the back of the bedroom door and smiled. It made my muscles look huge—so maybe no one would notice the stupid pimple. I tucked the shirt into my shorts and rubbed some antiperspirant into my armpits, hoping it would work this time. I picked up my backpack and made sure one more time I had everything: notebook, pens, my cheap cell phone—yeah, I hadn’t forgotten anything. I put my wallet in my back pocket and sat down on the edge of my bed to put on my socks and shoes.
“Is Glenn picking you up?” my mother said from my doorway. She was holding a chipped coffee mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was leaning against the door frame. She was already dressed for work. Her graying black hair was pinned up, and she looked tired like she always did. Resentment toward my deadbeat dad flared up for a moment, but I pushed it aside. Getting mad at him wasn’t going to make the support check get here any sooner, and it wouldn’t make the check any bigger, either.
I nodded. “Yeah, he should be here any minute.”
“You ready for the shit to hit the fan?” She raised an eyebrow.
I exhaled. “It hasn’t been so bad at football practice so far, Mom.” That wasn’t completely true—yeah, sure, some of the guys on the team were acting like assholes, but there hadn’t been any real trouble. I think everyone was too afraid of Coach Roberts to do anything more than mutter things out of the side of their mouths.
And the guys acting like assholes had always been assholes, even before Glenn made his big announcement over the summer.
She flicked ash onto the faded linoleum. “Football practice is one thing,” she said carefully. “But school’s different. You know I wish he hadn’t done it.” She shook her head. “What was he thinking?”
“He said he was tired of lying to everyone.” I didn’t look at her. I thought she was right, but somehow saying so seemed disloyal to him, like a betrayal.
And there was enough of that going around without me adding to it, that was for damned sure.
Glenn Lockhart had been my best friend ever since he moved here the summer before our junior year. He was a really good guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was always in a good mood—just being around him always picked me up no matter how bad a mood I was in. I’d liked Glenn almost from the start—he was smart and funny, with a slightly offbeat sense of humor. He loved South Park and could quote lines from it nonstop, and always knew exactly what to say to make everyone laugh without ever missing a beat. He was a straight A student who never seemed to study much, but he always knew the answer to every question he was asked in class. He made it all seem effortless, and he was always reading a book—there were always a couple of paperback novels in his locker. Mrs. Drury, the English teacher, practically worshipped the ground he walked on.
Well, all the teachers did.
All the rest of us at Southern Heights High School had been going to school together since kindergarten, so he’d always be thought of as the new kid. Being new, the cliques cemented into place in grade school didn’t matter to him at all. He’d hang out with anybody—that was another one of the things I liked about Glenn.
He didn’t care that I lived in this crappy rented house and had a deadbeat dad.
He was hard to miss in a school our size. I’d first seen him at football practice, which always started two weeks before school with two-a-days—at six in the morning and six in the evening. I didn’t really pay much attention to him—he lived on the side of town where the kids with money lived, but on the first day of school it turned out we had weightlifting together during sixth period.
The football players could elect to go to the weight room and lift rather than sit in study hall. I hated study hall, so I was more than happy to get out of it. That first day our junior year I’d walked into the weight room and everyone else was already partnered up except for the new kid—which was fine with me. The other guys in the weight room didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual.
They were assholes, and I wouldn’t trust them to spot me.
“I’m Glenn Lockhart,” he said when I walked up to him to introduce myself. He wore plastic-framed glasses with enormous lenses and had light brown hair, big brown eyes, and one thick eyebrow that ran across his forehead. He was grinning at me. “Guess we’re going to be workout partners, huh?”
“Looks that way. My name’s Tony Martin,” I replied, shaking his hand. “Guess we should get started. Where are you from?”
“Chicago.” I followed him over to the squat rack.
“Wow,” I replied, looking at him with a new respect. The biggest city I’d ever been to was Topeka. “This must seem like a foreign planet.”
He shrugged as he put a couple of forty-five-pound plates on the bar. He smiled at me. “I don’t know, I kind of like it.”
He was friendly enough, and we really hit it off that first day in the weight room. He made me laugh, which got us glares from the other guys in the weight room, which we both ignored.
Now it seemed like we’d always been friends. We’d even double-dated to the prom.
He moved here because his dad had gotten transferred. His dad was an engineer for a railroad (“he doesn’t drive trains, he builds bridges”) and had an office over in Kahola, the county seat. His mom was dead—Glenn never talked about her beyond that, and I never pushed him on it. I think she died when he was really young—there were pictures of her all over his house, and she’d been really pretty. Glenn and his dad were close. I envied him that. I’d only seen my own father maybe three times total since he walked out on us when I was twelve, and it was always obvious he couldn’t wait for the visit to be over. My brother and I were supposed to spend a month with him every summer, but we hadn’t done that in years. His new wife was a bitch.
As far as I was concerned, they deserved each other.
But Glenn and I had that in common—single parents. Unlike my mom, Glenn’s dad made good money. Their house was really nice—they had central air-conditioning and carpeting. Glenn also got an allowance—twenty dollars a week. That set him apart from most of the kids at school. The majority of our classmates lived on farms and had to work. I was a little jealous—it would be great to spend the summer hanging out at the Kahola Country Club pool getting a tan instead of sweating my ass off every day in the sun baling hay at Crowther Ranch. It would be great to not have to worry about buying new clothes or coming up with the money to go on a date.
Not to mention having my own car.
It was about mid-July that everyone found out why he was spending so much time at the country club pool.
He’d told me that he liked the lifeguard working there, which I thought was great. He’d had this terrible on-again off-again thing with Laney Norton pretty much our whole junior year that made him miserable. After their disastrous prom date—which I’d had the misfortune to witness—he swore he was done with her for good.
I was pretty surprised to find out the lifeguard’s name was Clark Murphy—and so was pretty much everyone else.
Glenn also took the opportunity to come out to the whole world on his Facebook page by announcing he and Clark were in a relationship.
“Glenn’s still my best friend, Mom,” I replied, standing up and slipping my backpack over my shoulder. “You know that hasn’t changed.”
She looked at me without expression for a minute before saying, “Good. I wouldn’t want to think I hadn’t raised you right.” She turned and walked back down to the kitchen.
I went out the front door and sat down in a rusty metal chair on the porch to wait for Glenn. Glenn always gave me a ride to school so I didn’t have to ride the bus. He also had been driving me to football practice since two-a-days started. His dad had bought him the car for his sixteenth birthday. He even had a credit card for the gas. I took a deep breath and waited.
I’d never admit it in a million years to my mom—or anyone else, for that matter—but I still didn’t know what to think about Glenn coming out. Not being comfortable with it made me feel like a jerk. I mean, he was still Glenn, right? I mean, I could understand why other kids might have a problem with it—for most of them Glenn was the first gay guy they’d known. But my mom’s brother Drew was gay, so I had more experience with gay people than everyone else at school.
Of course, I hadn’t seen Uncle Drew since I was in junior high. We’d gone out to Los Angeles to visit him—he actually worked at Disney Studios. He didn’t have a boyfriend then, but he took us everywhere and he was really cool. He always sent me a fifty dollar bill on every birthday and at Christmas.
But with Glenn, I don’t know, it was a little different. I mean, Uncle Drew and I had never slept in the same bed. Uncle Drew and I had never wrestled around. I didn’t take communal showers with my uncle or change in front of him.
At least Glenn called me before he went public on Facebook—he wanted to tell me before he put it online for the whole world to see. I didn’t know what to say, I was so shocked. I’d had no idea he was gay. I started to tell him he shouldn’t do it. But I couldn’t think of how to say it without sounding like an asshole.
And I couldn’t stop wondering about the other stuff—did he look at me when we showered after weightlifting? I hated myself for even wondering about it—it was Glenn, my funny, smart friend who could always cheer me up and make me laugh. Through my shock I heard myself saying, “You have to do what’s right for you, Glenn.”
“Thanks, Tony.” He let out a huge sigh of relief. “I was really worried you’d, you know, have a problem with it. I should have known better.”
“Yeah,” I heard myself reply.
“You’re really the best, you know that?” He went on, “You know, you’re more than just my friend. I think of you as a brother.”
I felt like a total jackass when I hung up the phone.
I stood by him when some of the kids started unfriending him and saying nasty stuff about him online. He was still Glenn. He was still my best friend. He hadn’t stopped being funny and smart and a good guy.
I just wished he would have waited till after graduation, or when he started college. He’d already been accepted to the University of Kansas, which was a more accepting place than Kahola County. No one would care.
So why mess up our senior year when you didn’t have to? My mom thought he should have waited—so did his dad. Mr. Lockhart supported him, of course—Mr. Lockhart would walk through fire for Glenn and not even think twice about it—but he confided in me.
“But that’s Glenn,” he had added proudly. “He’s not going to hide and act like he’s ashamed when he isn’t.”
I was proud of him too, even though I wasn’t so happy about it. I know I couldn’t have done it. I would have waited until I was long gone to Kansas City before I said a word to anyone about it.
I tried to not let him see how uncomfortable I was with the gay thing. I know it was wrong not to be completely accepting of my best friend, and I was ashamed of myself.
Logically I knew it didn’t matter, but those feelings, those ugly horrible feelings, just wouldn’t go away. I kept telling myself they would, but they were always there.
But I was getting used to changing in front of him, and using the communal showers after football practice. If I didn’t think about it, I was okay. But every once in a while, I’d remember and get uncomfortable. I don’t think I showed it, but I hated myself for feeling that way.
I wasn’t the only one, either.
Most of the guys acted like nothing was different—but there were some who had a problem with him being in the locker room with us. They always waite
d for him to get dressed and leave before they’d change or get undressed or shower.
Some parents apparently complained to Coach Roberts about their sons and the locker room after football practice. I’d heard there was talk of getting him kicked off the football team.
But so far, nothing had come of it.
I found out because Coach Roberts pulled me into his office the first day of practice and talked to me about it.
“If anyone gives him any trouble, I want you to come to me, understood?” he’d said to me that afternoon in his office. “Be his friend, Tony.” He ran his hand over his balding head. “He’s going to need his friends. This could get really ugly.”
I just nodded and didn’t say anything.
As far as I knew, no one ever did or said anything to him. Coach Roberts ran a tight ship, and he’d toss you off the team in a heartbeat if he thought you were causing trouble. But every once in a while, I heard things—things said out of the side of the mouth, muttered so you couldn’t really tell who said it—and the mean laughs afterward.
Like fag and faggot and cocksucker.
That made my blood boil, but I never could be sure who said it.
If I had to guess, I’d pick Zack Zimmer and Randy Froelich.
Zack and I’d always been friends. He was a year behind us in school. His dad was the preacher at Blessed Lamb Church over in Carterville, and they had a farm just outside of town. When we were in junior high, Zack was the one who introduced me to smoking marijuana. It was right after my dad had left and I went through a bad patch. My grades went down, and I just didn’t care about anything except getting high. I’d ride the bus over to Carterville after school with Zack, and we’d get high out in the hayloft of the barn behind their house. His mother would drive me home around suppertime, clicking her tongue and making appropriate noises over me. I never liked Mrs. Zimmer very much—she always smelled like powder and cheap perfume, and I knew she felt sorry for me. I’d heard her talking to Brother Zimmer once when they didn’t know I could hear, and she called me “that poor fatherless boy, and you know the mother is just trash.” Zack and me, we kept hanging out until right before the end of our sophomore year, when Coach Roberts took me aside one day after weightlifting and told me I needed to straighten out. “You like playing on the football team, don’t you?” he’d asked me, and I nodded. “I’m not accusing you of anything, but I know you’re smarter than your grades would let on, and I think maybe hanging around with Zack Zimmer might not be the smartest thing for you to do.”